20 Jul
2011
20 Jul
'11
11:29 a.m.
From:Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 8:43 AM
On 20 Jul 2011 at 10:46, Rod Smallwood wrote:
> They had limited functions and were really glass
teletypes.
> Not so the VT100. A really well engineered micro processor based
> terminal with more functionality than a programmer knew what to do
> with.
For their time, the VT52 terminals were quite a bit
more than glass
TTYs. I've used terminals that really were glass TTYs; at most, you
could erase a screen or (hopefully) a line. There were terminals
that did not implement any sort of scrolling.
The VT-52 is pretty much full-featured with cursor
positioning, erase
to end of screen/line, primitive graphics, XON/XOFF flow control and
a cursor keypad.
For its time, not bad and certainly useful--and
certainly enough for
most editors and applications. One could have wished for a way to
display characters wtih attributes (reverse, bold, underlined, etc.),
but that's a minor quibble. Software-controllable scroll-lock would
have been nice...
As a matter of fact, I created a "3-D" version of the Star Trek game
for the VT52 (actually a clone, I think a Teleray, but code compatible
with the VT52). Even did all the spherical trig to get torpedo tracks
right.
If you remember, the BASIC version of the game would type out an 8x8
sector map, showing stars, Klingons, and the Romulan. I was exposed
to this game under VSBASIC on a 370/168 under Wylbur at the University
of Chicago Comp Center; I read the entire source, thought "I can do
better than this," and wrote a version in PL/I that would clear the
screen of a VT52, type 8 8x8 sector maps, with a ship's status display
in the center of the screen.
It ran interactively under TSO. <hrrkkk!>
Not long after, I was introduced to Adventure on the DEC-20, and a love
affair began that has not ended to this day.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/